Contact centers are employed by many enterprises to service customer contacts. A typical contact center includes a switch and/or server to receive and route incoming packet-switched and/or circuit-switched contacts and one or more resources, such as human agents and automated resources (e.g., Interactive Voice Response (IVR) units), to service the incoming contacts. Contact centers distribute contacts, whether inbound or outbound, for servicing to any suitable resource according to predefined criteria. In many existing systems, the criteria for servicing the contact from the moment that the contact center becomes aware of the contact until the contact is connected to an agent are customer-specifiable (i.e., programmable by the operator of the contact center), via a capability called vectoring. Normally in a present-day automatic call distributor (ACD), when the ACD system's controller detects that an agent has become available to handle a contact, the controller identifies all predefined contact-handling queues for the agent (usually in some order of priority) and delivers to the agent the highest-priority oldest contact that matches the agent's highest-priority queue. Generally, the only condition that results in a contact not being delivered to an available agent is that there are no contacts waiting to be handled.
The primary objective of contact center management is to ultimately maximize contact center performance and profitability. An ongoing challenge in contact center administration is monitoring and optimizing contact center efficiency. Contact center efficiency can be measured with a number of different performance parameters, which are usually related to contact center agent performance.
The difficulty in monitoring a contact center's efficiency is that reports showing performance metrics of the contact center are usually static and generated some time after a problem has occurred. The net result of delayed and static reporting, especially to contact center management personnel, is that issues in the contact center cannot be addressed until after the problem has likely passed. When a contact center agent is having a bad day, for example, and the agent's performance metrics are sub-standard, the agent's manager will likely not receive any notice that the agent is having a bad day until the next day. Thus, when the manager attempts to fix the situation it may not need fixing or, worse yet, it may be too late to fix. Also, the problem may not necessarily need fixing on the following day because the agent is having a better day than the previous day.
These problems associated with delayed reporting are not just confined to the world of contact centers. Similar problems exist in market trading (e.g., stock markets, bond markets, future markets, commodities, etc.) and all other businesses where efficiency directly relates to profits. When problems occur, reports related to such problems are generally not produced until after the fact. Even in a stock market trading enterprise, reports regarding the performance of various stocks may be generated rather quickly when a particular event occurs (e.g., a stock price rises above a predetermined price or falls below a predetermined price). However, such reports are usually limited in the amount of information they disseminate (usually just stock price and trading volume information) and in the format of the report.